Open Up! was a big conference held in London on November 13, jointly between the Omidyar Network (ON), DFID and Wired Magazine. Martin Tisné (ex-Integrity Action) was the main organizer of the conference at ON.

The conference focus was on the use of technology. See here: http://openup12.org/agenda/

The key speeches are here: http://www.dfid.gov.uk/News/Latest-news/2012/Open-Up/

OPENNESS AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE COULD SAVE $2.5 TRILLION BY 2020

It is estimated that, by 2020, upwards of $2.5 trillion annually could be lost on an international level through corruption, mismanagement and inefficiency in construction. Governments and the international construction sector now have the potential to combat this by signing up to the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST).

The NIR team has just returned from a week in Nepal piloting training on aid and budgets. The training was developed with AidInfo, International Budget Partnership and Publish What You Fund and was designed to support organisations in aid dependent countries access and analyse aid and budget information, showing participants how to use this data to support their advocacy work.

From 2nd to 5th March 2012, The School of Business and Management at American University of Sharjah, along with the Pearl Initiative, hosted the Integrity Action Arab Integrity Education Network. This is a network of professors from Universities across the Arab world working together to develop meaningful and empowering courses in Arabic that help students build values, integrity and a toolkit for implementation in future working life. This meeting was a working group of 28 Professors coming together on the path to developing a full-semester course curriculum on ethics in Arabic.